Artifacts and exhibits of this particular moment we are living through. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Exhibit One: Ira talks to producer Emmanuel Dzotsi, who brings the first exhibit into the studio with him: a chunk of concrete with some yellow paint on it. He got it from the demolition site in Washington, DC, where the giant Black Lives Matter letters are being dug out of the street with heavy equipment. (8 minutes)Exhibit Two: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Ranjani Srinivasan, who tells the story of how her life was transformed over five days via a series of events that started out confusing and escalated to frightening. (25 minutes)Exhibit Three: Producer Laura Starecheski takes us inside one dramatic court hearing on the Trump administration’s executive order and new policy banning transgender people from serving in the military. (20 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: What is the Museum of Now?
This is actually the hold music that people all over the country are hearing when they try to reach the Social Security Administration. The agency sends out payments to some 70 million people every month. The agency says that it is getting way more calls than usual right now.
Elon Musk and all the talk of rooting out fraud and kicking dead people off of the rolls seem to be freaking out millions of senior citizens. So more of them are calling. Audits, by the way, show that lots of dead people are not getting checks. That is not a thing. Wait times were long even before this. But right now, a fourth of the callers basically get a busy signal and have to try again.
If you call and you do get put on hold, there is a callback option. But one of our coworkers decided to stay on the line to see how long it would take.
Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience. The estimated hold time is 60 minutes.
Yeah, there's nowhere close to that. They finally picked up at one hour, 39 minutes.
Hi, thank you for calling.
The worker who did finally pick up the phone, I will say, was super nice, very helpful.
Of course, you're welcome. Is there anything else that I could do for you at all today?
That's all.
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Chapter 2: What is the story behind the Black Lives Matter street mural?
So I was sort of going back and forth during the time waiting for her reply, thinking whether I should be grading or should I not be grading.
Oh, so you were trying to distract yourself by grading papers, but then you're like, is this breaking the law itself?
Yes, exactly. But it wasn't. So I was told in writing that I was allowed to, you know, just go about my normal life. I don't need to worry. This is all being treated as very run of the mill. And the tone from Columbia is that this happens to many students. It's not, you know, a rare thing.
They tell her the next available appointment is in five days. Five days felt like too long to wait. The college was telling her that this would all get sorted out easily. But Ranjini has always been fastidious about her paperwork. She has an encrypted folder on her computer for all things visa-related. She's been in the U.S.
since 2016 and knows almost all her entry and exit dates off the top of her head. She doesn't like loose ends, and she didn't like the idea of waiting five days. So she gets them to change the appointment to the next day. Ranjani's from Chennai in the south of India. In 2016, she was awarded a Fulbright to get a master's in design at Harvard.
And she was very excited to go to an American university.
The U.S. scholarship is really robust. You know, there's a great intellectual culture of inquiry. A lot of the people I had read or like my intellectual heroes went to many of these universities. You know, David Harvey, he's an economic geographer. And, you know, Ambedkar, who is the architect of the Indian Constitution, actually studied at Columbia.
So I was super excited to, you know, kind of see the U.S. and like take part in this like culture of inquiry.
She graduated with a master's from Harvard and then followed her intellectual hero to Columbia to get a Ph.D. in urban planning. Her work focuses on the way that urbanization impacts the labor force. She often went back to India to do fieldwork. But she settled happily in her life on campus. She's made lots of friends, including her roommate, another Ph.D. student.
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